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Kingdom Hearts was among the best games of the PS2; right up there with God of War and Guitar Hero. You should give it another chance.
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I'm not talking about the first Kingdom Hearts, which I liked a lot. And don't misunderstand me; I still like Kingdom Hearts 2, but that enjoyment took a heinous blow during the first 5 hours.
For those who don't know what I'm talking about, let me explain this once and for all. When you first start to play KH2, you
don't take control of Sora, nor do you see any Disney characters. That's because Sora, Goofy and Donald are still encased in ice (or something) from the events of the GBA game, Chain of Memoires (unplayed by me). Instead, you play as this uninteresting kid named Roxas.
That wouldn't be so bad if you actually got to have any fun. You don't. For the first 5 hours, you spend most of your time being given a tutorial of how to play the game (though the game can't even do
that properly) and running around doing mindless tasks that have absolutely no connection to anything that makes Kingdom Hearts a fun game.
For example, to deliver items to people using a skateboard to raise enough money to take a train trip (but of course, after you waste all that time, your cash is stolen). You rarely get to participate in any battles (and only one can truly be considered a battle) and even then, the game does a bad job of illustrating how the battles have been improved over the last game; namely, by the improved camera angles/control and more in-depth combat (the two main problems with the first game).
To make this even worse, the game's story is so disgustingly self-indulgent during this period that (and I timed it) during those 5 hours, you spend only
50 minutes actually playing the game. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, for the first 5 hours, you'll be spending 5/6 of that time watching dreadfully boring cutscenes about characters we don't care about that only serve to fill in the story gaps in between this game and Chain of Memories. Yes, you can skip these cutscenes, but considering how in-depth the plot is (and that I didn't play the GBA game), I couldn't really skip them for fears that I'd miss something important that would be important down the road.
Basically, you're only playing the game for the first 5 hours so the game can tell its story, and the game part is such a complete afterthought that it's appalling. I'm told in cutscene to go somewhere, I walk down the hallway to get there, I get another cutscene, then I walk down
another hallway and get
another cutscene.
People chided Metal Gear Solid 2 for having too many cutscenes interspersed into the gameplay, but at least that game had the common courtesy to let its players play a fun game for a while, and even when it ended, the satisfaction of the gameplay was enough to make up for having so many cutscenes (which, unlike KH2, were at least somewhat interesting).
Even the first Kingdom Hearts had a slightly lengthy opening (about 2 hours before Sora met Goofy and Donald), but it was far better done in every respect than this game. I'm starting to think that with KH2, Tetsuya Nomura and his team became so enraptured by their storyline that they forget that it was being put into a
video game. You know, something that, for most of the time, you're supposed to be
playing. If they really wanted this story to be explained so badly, they should have just put it onto a DVD, edited it to a reasonable length, and include it in the box with the game. Don't make players suffer through all this and then put weak bits of gameplay in there to remind us that, yes, we are still playing a game.
Finally, (and I'm going to spoil this, so don't read on if you don't want it done) Roxas finds out that he's pretty much a tool of Sora and that he has no reason to live, to which I say, "Thank God!" Then Sora, Goofy, and Donald reawaken, and after 5 hours of suffering, the game finally starts, and guess what? It's awesome (even though there are still a few too many cutscenes, though they're far more interesting).
That's what makes me so mad about this. Players have to sit through 5 hours of perhaps the worst prologue in gaming history, only then to be rewarded with an amazing game that fixes all the problems of its predecessor. But, the developers had to introduce a problem that the first game never suffered from and it's the kind of thing that's so bad, I'm surprised that after 3 hours, people didn't just turn the game off in disgust and start to regret their purchase (and then, if you're like me, contemplate paying someone money to suffer through the prologue for you so you can actually enjoy the game).
To put this into the proper perspective, it's like if Shigeru Miyamoto were to tell his players that they have to play 5 hours worth of Superman 64 before they could play Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Wouldn't
that be nice.